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The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza N. 65 - March 2021

WNew Supercomputing postdoc: José Carlos Ruiz Luque

Carlos Luque has joined the SIE this January as the new supercomputing support postdoc. Carlos obtained his PhD in Computer Architecture in 2014 at the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña. He then worked in a private firm as a software engineer until 2017, when he joined the Medical Technology Group in the University Institute for Biomedical and Healthcare Research (IUIBS) at the University of Las Palmas. In 2019 he was hired by IACTEC to work as a software engineer in the Medical Technology Group. Here at the IAC he will support research relying on HPC at the IAC (HTCondor, Deimos/Diva, LaPalma and TeideHPC supercomputers), and train users on the use of the supercomputing resources available: parallel and distributed computing, parallel programming (MPI, OpenMP), advanced programming and code optimization, GPU, and Cloud Computing. As part of his EuroCC commitments, he will support use and access to HPC to local universities and research institutions with limited resources, and reach out to small and medium-size companies interested in taking advantage of HPC.

IRAF on macOS (Catalina/Big Sur) with Multipass

With the latest versions of macOS, Catalina and BigSur, running IRAF has become a problem. In fact, these releases do not allow any longer to run 32bit executables, which are widely used in IRAF (most notably, xgterm and the STSDAS/TABLES external packages are 32bit). However, this limitation can be circumvented by installing a lightweight Ubuntu virtual machine using Multipass. The installation procedure is quite simple and permits to use IRAF with no restrictions (NC: I have used it myself for the Master in Astrophysics classes at the ULL). Step by step installation instructions can be found in Installation of IRAF on macOS with Multipass. Drop us a line (sinfin@iac.es) if you have any questions.

HTCondor usage in 2020

Usage of HTCondor in 2020 has been 870,000 CPU-hours approximately, with about 17% of all available cores used on average. This is a marked decrease with respect to 2019, where about 1,315,000 CPU-hours were used up, for an average occupation of 25% of all available cores. Detailed monthly usage statistics are available at the (internal) http://carlota:81/SIE/softwarestats/pages/en/htcondor.php website, which also includes a ranking of the top HTCondor users. Furthermore, HTCondor usage reports have been added (http://carlota:81/SIE/softwarestats/pages/en/htcondor/htcondor-usage-reports.php), which briefly explain how HTCondor was used and why it was important for the research carried out. We thank all those users who have replied to our request to provide such information, while those who haven't will see their HTCondor jobs priority plunge to the very bottom tier. Finally, a couple of modifications (transparent to the final user) were made to fix a problem where HTCondor daemons did not restart automatically when a machine was rebooted, and to solve an error about the CONDOR_CONFIG variable when using condor_q and other related commands.

Intel oneAPI

December last year Intel released "oneAPI", which is "an open, unified programming model built on standards to simplify development and deployment of data-centric workloads across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators." The most important thing is that Intel oneAPI is absolutely free (no license required), and not only includes all the Intel compilers and libraries we have been enjoying with the "Composer Edition", but also some cluster-related tools (such as the Trace Analyzer Collector and the Cluster Checker) we didn't have because of their expensive licence fee. Please feel free to explore and try new Intel oneAPI tools, by loading the module for the package you are interested in. All the oneAPI (Base and HPC) modules are listed under the /opt/intel/oneapi/modulefiles/ heading when running module avail. Command module whatis <modulename> will print a brief description of the corresponding tool. Further information can be found in the Intel oneAPI website.
SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 65 - March 2021 - Contact: